The Testing and the Quality

A Parable

There was once a software testing department that was understaffed, overworked and way behind. Not a long time ago or in a place far far away, but in a major American city — just last month.

Try though they might, this hardy band of testers couldn’t catch up, couldn’t begin to catch up. Delays”R”Us was them. Plus, they only directly tested a few of their company’s applications, leaving the majority to the good intentions of various dev and maintenance teams. This being a parable, you know what they say about good intentions.

Bugs slipped through, boy did they slip through, right into production, into the hands of users. Notwithstanding this being a parable, it must be noted that today’s users are often customers, as in the people who pay the company for the service that has regression bugs in it. Not good.

The testing team tried Selenium, they still used QualityCenter, they even tried crowdsourcing for their public facing apps. Mostly they got by on elbow grease, lots of it, or at least as much as a dozen people who know they’re fighting a losing battle could expend. It turns out that that was a lot, if not nearly enough. To paraphrase Faber College’s Dean Wormer: “Over-budget, late and behind-the-eightball is no way to go through life.” But who could blame them? Manual testing will do that to a team, always does that to a team in fact. Live by manual testing, die by manual testing, quickly.

Then innovation struck in the form of Appvance IQ, the first AI driven test automation system. First thing Appvance IQ does is make short work of regression testing, automates it in fact. This fancy feat has the plain name of Automatic Regression Testing or ART for short.

ART takes the labor out of regression testing even as it tests everything users try to do with the AUT (application-under-test). Ev-ree-thing! Here in Silicon Valley, ART is the Platonic Ideal of testing: better, faster, cheaper.

Gifted Appvance IQ – with its Automatic Regression Testing capability – the hardy team of testers in a major American city made short work of their regression testing backlog.

Bam: They used AI scripting to instantly generate comprehensive script portfolios for each AUT, script portfolios that capture everything every user tried to do with the AUT.

Pow: They ran those script portfolios through test execution, turning up a big pile of regression bugs in the process, which they promptly sent over to dev.

Zap: Dev quickly squashed the bugs, since most were easy fixes.

Shazam: Bug-driven downtime fell like a stone. Successful user actions went up, revenues rose, and the hardy little testing department became heroes to everyone from the CEO to the CFO to the sales team to the, well, to everybody.